Tag: Exceptionality

If the machinery of intelligence-gathering and war is never switched off, then we have truly entered the permanent state of emergency. This 10-minute video essay looks at control rooms in film and television since the 1970s, and identifies an array of technological apparatuses that both manifest and make possible an increasingly distributed kind of sovereignty.…

Though I do like breaking femurs You can count me with the dreamers Like everybody else, I got a dream… (I’ve got a dream, Tangled) The jig is finally up, politics isn’t running as normal anymore (although ‘the oppressed’ always knew that the ‘state of emergency’ was normal, reminding us that our ‘amazement’ revealed the…

Pasolini’s courage and passion is more relevant today than ever as Europe slips into the hands of a dangerous rhetoric of fear which finds shape in the form of normalisation of zones of exception. Forty-one years ago, on 2 November 1975, Pier Paolo Pasolini, a Marxist, an intellectual, a film director and a poet was…

Key Concept Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, the first book of his multi-volume Homo Sacer project, urges a reconsideration of theories of sovereignty as put forward ‘from Hobbes to Rousseau’ (1998: 109). The theory of sovereign power offered by the book is based on the state of exception (as in Schmitt[1])…

<<< Part I State of exception, resurgent sovereignty? The Australian government has attempted to assert that the entire RSA process is an exercise of non-statutory executive power and as such, status assessors and independent reviewers are under no obligation to afford an applicant procedural fairness or to decide applications according to existing law. However late…

As workers and students were occupying and rioting across Europe in December last year, activists in Australia were again mourning the tragic loss of life of undocumented migrants.[1] On the 15th of December a boat carrying 100 asylum seekers was wrecked against rocks in rough seas off Christmas Island, at least 48 of those on…